Sandworm Ride: David Attenborough

Dawn, on the open sand. The heat has not yet arrived, and in the brief cool the desert holds its breath.

We must whisper now. Not for fear — the animal cannot hear us — but out of respect. One always whispers near something this old.

Here, on an exposed ridge of sand, we find our subject: a juvenile primate, lean, recently separated from his natal group. He has travelled a great distance to be here, and he has come, remarkably, alone — a behaviour almost unheard of in a creature so young. Most of his kind would not survive a single night in the deep desert. This one has survived rather a lot of them. We do not yet know why.

And note — he is carrying tools. This is significant. Tool use among the young males is the culmination of years of instruction, and what he intends to do with them is, I promise you, worth the wait.

He waits. Patience, in this environment, is not a virtue but a survival strategy, and he has it in abundance. He is listening — not with his ears, but through the soles of his feet, reading vibrations in the sand the way you or I might read a letter. Somewhere below, something enormous is approaching. He has known it was coming for some time. He is, if anything, early.

Now. Here is the moment. I’d ask you to keep very still — though of course it is I who am narrating and you who are reading, so we shall simply have to imagine the stillness together.

He drives a tool into the sand. And the desert, with no fuss at all, begins to rise.

Forty metres of it. Perhaps more. The largest land animal this world has ever produced, and one of the largest the recorded universe has to offer — emerging not in anger, you understand, but simply because that is where it was going. We so often mistake size for menace. The animal has no opinion of us at all. That, I always think, is the truly humbling part.

It breaches the surface in a long, unhurried arc, trailing a wind that carries the warm and unmistakable scent of the spice for which this whole desert is, in its way, a single vast organism. The young male does not run. This is the behaviour we have come all this distance to observe.

And THIS — oh, this is wonderful — watch what he does. He does not attack it. He could not possibly harm it; the notion is absurd. Instead he fixes his hook so as to hold open one segment of its hide. The animal cannot tolerate sand against its softer inner tissue, and so it rolls that segment gently upward, away from the ground — and in doing so, quite without meaning to, it lifts him clear. He has not defeated the giant. He has simply made himself a small and manageable inconvenience. It is one of the most elegant arrangements in all of nature.

And now he rides.

Few sights in the natural world can match it. A creature weighing perhaps a tonne at most, riding atop a creature weighing tens of thousands — not by strength, never by strength, but by understanding. He has learned precisely how the animal wishes to move, and he has simply… asked it, in the only language it knows. The giant carries him out toward the deep desert, entirely unbothered, possibly unaware. To the giant, he is a passing itch. To the boy, it is everything.

On the dunes behind, his people have gathered to watch. They do not interfere. They have all, in their time, done this very thing, and they know better than anyone that it cannot be helped from the outside. It must be earned alone.

To them, this is a rite of passage — the single most important morning of a young life. The herd watches the juvenile and sees, perhaps, a god in the making. Or perhaps the most embarrassing thing they have ever witnessed. Nature, so often, declines to tell us which — and I have learned, over a very long life, not to insist that she choose.

The boy turns the great animal toward the open waste, and the watchers raise a cry — of triumph, of welcome, of something older than either. And the giant, indifferent to all of it, carries its small passenger out across the sand and into the shimmering distance, where the dunes blur into heat and the eye, at last, loses them both.